WCAG and some linguistics problems

Hi everyone,

i have a doubt i've discussed today with some friends in Hungary and as far
as i have no answers, maybe it could be an interesting point to be developed
and shared with you...

you shall know that in hungarian there are some peculiar graphical elements
(phonemas) which are not rendered in the usual Ascii - iso 8859 used for the
Web. So many Hungarian pages are written changing this letters (which
expecially are an o and an u with long Umlaut - in hungarian there era two
kind of umlaut and meaning can get very different). there is a pretty easy
example:
tu'rò' - cottage cheese, written with long plain vowels
and t"uro" - someone who in sopporting something - written with long umlaut
vowels

The way i've written you down these words is one of the current ways
Hungarian people writes them on the net. there have been proposed other
alternatives, like using the long o we use for tokio and the norvegian ø but
they do not belong to the graphical (graphemic) hungarian sistem.
for having an idea of what i exactly mean, you can have a look at this page:
http://iris.elte.hu/meteosat/
all the strange signs on o and u are long umlauts.
Same for the http://www.ittk.hu/infinit/2000/0713/index.html the
Information Society Research Institute in Hungary

So we started discussing one point that could be pretty close to
accessibility acocrding to me: if i am doing some researches on the net
(state with google for instance) how shall i write these words? and how can
i be sure that the result i am looking for is conforme to the results i
ecpect to gain? I mean: if i am looking for a cottage cheese, how can i be
sure that the "turo" result i get is the turo i mean and not the substantive
of someone supporting.

This is an easy case that can be solved maybe with some boolean elements,
but what for ho's (adj. "with snow" and also adj. "some months old") and
ho"s (noun hero) or the thousant other words differing just for a vowel?

Can this all be considered accessibility issues or are a faraway topic
according to you? and again: how shall we standardize this ascii code in
order to let assistive technologies rendere better the hungarian words, if
there's no a homogenic web writing on the hungarian net?

Shall we think about gving also some checkpoints about the correct writing
and correct use of graphemas to WCAG in order to let this problems be solved
and develop in a more efficient and funcional way the web accessibility?

M2p -- Pat


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Received on Thursday, 16 October 2003 12:32:34 UTC